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10 Ways to Get Serious About Social Media
3 January, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund Leave a Comment10 Ways to Get Serious About Social Media
If this is your year to buckle down and tackle a social media strategy, it’s time to get serious. The time for oohing and ahhing is rapidly drawing to a close, and instead your efforts have to become about practical, methodical application.
Here’s 10 ways to get serious about social media this year. There are plenty more, too. Add yours in the comments.
1) Quit counting fans, followers, and blog subscribers like bottle caps. Think, instead, about what you’re hoping to achieve with and through the community that actually cares about what you’re doing.
2) Learn how to measure stuff, and quit making excuses for why you can’t do it. Katie Paine’s blog is overflowing with stuff. Here’s some metrics you might consider if they’re applicable for your goals. And here’s how you can start setting measurable objectives.
3) Learn what case studies can and can’t do for you. Stop saying there aren’t enough of them and go Google the term “social media case studies” or spend a few minutes on my Delicious links. Then, get busy writing your own.
4) Understand the difference between making a business case for social media and chasing the next and greatest fad. If you don’t understand how to explain where social media impacts areas outside the business besides your own, make a concerted effort to learn.
5) Stop lauding social media as the thing that’s going to fix it all. Fix your business first. And read Jay Baer’s blog (including this post) for a reality check.
6) Approach social media methodically, and with the same care that you would any other business investment you make. Tamsen McMahon will help.
7) Quit waiting for the water to be perfect before you get in. It’s not going to be, ever. Try something that makes strategic sense for your business. Julien Smith articulates a bit about why waiting for one tiny thing is often what holds us back.
Think long term, and commit to it. That doesn’t mean some of your experiments can’t be finite, but the overall approach has to be for good. Mitch Joel even says so.
9) Focus on what you’re good at. Know the core of your business, and make that the center of your work, especially through the amplifier of social media. Chris Penn reminds us of the importance of this, as he’s apt to do.
10) Recognize that potential missteps shouldn’t paralyze you into inaction. Acknowledge that there are ways to recover from, say, a misguided communication effort. Having a plan to pick yourself up is the key, rather than trying to avoid failure at all costs (including stagnation).
What else would you add? What’s your buckle-down strategy this year, and how are you turning your approach from theory into application? Share your ideas, favorite posts, and strategies in the comments.
image by L. Marie
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Study: How Are B2Bs Using Social Media
from Small Business Trends by Lisa Barone
Earlier this month we told you about the Business.com study that looked at how business professionals were using social media. Well, a newly released 58-page companion report attempts to evaluate the same results from the perspective of business-to-business (B2B) company execs, professionals and agencies. The reports breaks down the most important social sites to B2B execs and agencies, how they determine social media success and the tools they’re using to bring it all together. There’s a lot of great information in the actual report, but here are some of the highlights I was able to pick out.
What types of social media are B2Bs using?
It’s worth noting that everyone questioned in the study is already using social media for business, either as a resource, to engage in initiatives or both. So the usage curve is probably higher than normal. According to the study, people from mid- to large-sized companies (100 employees or more) were far more active in social media than people from smaller companies. I found that to be rather surprising.
The study reported:
- 46 percent of mid- to large-businesses use Twitter, compared to just 28 percent of SMBs.
- 84 percent of mid- to large-businesses listen to podcasts or attend webinars, compared to just 67 percent of SMBs.
- 66 percent of mid- to large-businesses conduct searches for information on social media sites, compared to 54 percent of SMBs.
The only area where SMBs owners did outrank their larger counterparts was in reading user ratings and reviews. The survey attributed this to SMBs not having a “more formalized purchasing process. The survey found no difference in how large and small companies used online communities or business Q&A sites.
As far as industries using social media, I was really surprised to see so much social media adoption. Though the individual numbers varied for different categories (Advertising, Internet, Financial, Retail, etc), in most cases more than 50 percent of businesses were at least engaging with their company’s personal social media entities.
The ‘Who’ and ‘How Much’ of Engagement
Who: For both B2B and B2Cs it’s the Marketing department(76 percent B2B, 63 percent B2C) that are primarily responsible for social media efforts, with Customer Supporter, Product and Other making up the rest. As for experience levels, the study found that the B2Bs overall have more experience with social media than their B2C counterparts. Thirty percent B2B respondents have less than one year of business social media experience (versus 35 percent for B2Cs). That said, more experience doesn’t mean more knowledge – both B2Bs and B2Cs consider themselves “new” to this social media for business thing.
Overall, B2Bs are more active in social media than B2Cs, with 81 percent of B2Bs maintaining one or more accounts on sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. They’re also much more likely to engage in micro-blogging on Twitter than B2C companies.
What do they use as success metrics?
- Web site traffic – 68 percent of B2Bs, 57 percent for B2Cs
- Brand Awareness, 61 percent and 52 percent, respectively
- Engagement with prospects, 60 percent and 57 percent respectively
- Engagement with customers, 52 percent and 51 percent, respectively
- Brand Reputation, 47 percent and 41 percent, respectively
Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin Groups are the most common sites where B2B’s manage profiles, which doesn’t differ from their B2C counterparts. Very interesting, though, was that 71 percent of B2B’s participate in LinkedIn Answers, as opposed to just 41 percent of B2Cs. Sounds like businesses are more interested in establishing expertise, where B2Cs are looking more to interact with prospective customers.
Monitoring Social Media
Not at all surprisingly, the study found that Twitter Search, Google Search and Google Alerts were the most popular was for B2Bs to track the conversation going on. These tools are all also free and easy to set up, going back to the education and experience levels mentioned above.
While there were several categories were percentages where significantly different for where B2Bs were spending their time and seeing value compared to B2Cs, it really feels like everyone’s still trying to figure out what works best for them. B2Bs are playing more in the professional areas like LinkedIn, LinkedIn Answers and using Twitter Search for research, where B2Cs are more relationship-oriented and using sites like Faceook , Yahoo Answers and even MySpace.
Great post from Small Business Trends by Lisa Barone on B2B and social media.
Small Business Social Media – Free, Expansive Advertising
Nikolas Severidt, November 18, 2009
Every business, whether large or small, new or developed, must locate effective ways to advertise. If you are looking for advertising on a massive scale, completely free of charge, you have found it in small business social media! Just about every business today, even if they operate out of a physical location, has an online presence. Many lack the ability to drive traffic to their sites, however. One great way is to utilize the expansive, complementary venue of the social media. Instead of counting on friends, family and other local customers, you can expand your reach to all corners of your target market through proper advertising avenues.
There are people out there looking for exactly what you are selling. It is your job to find them and tell them what you have to offer. A personal, effective way to accomplish this is by utilizing the vastly popular realm of social media sites. Yes, you could stick to advertising on television commercials and with pay per click ads, but you will be missing a lucrative market available to you completely for free! This is the answer for many small business social media men and women who are familiar with these aspects online. Even if you are not, it is easy to learn.Small business social media online is something that takes a bit of time to learn, but it is fairly easy and actually very fun to get involved in! You might choose to set up a Twitter account or Facebook page in the name of yourself or allow a few employees to do so. You might also decide to simply have the page be the voice of the business itself. Both are effective approaches that you may want to compare and decide what you think would work best for your specific business.While you should not rely solely on the ability of small business social media to bring customers to your site, it is one tactic that absolutely should not be ignored. There will undoubtedly be a need to establish some paid advertising in other places online, but why would you pass up an opportunity to get exposure for free? You can have great fun personalizing your business in the eyes of your customers and generating loyal customers and fans. This and other business techniques exist at www.businesssuccesssimplified.com, where the goal is to simplify how you can find success in your business.Matt Bacak’s Article Marketing Strategy: 3 Steps to Make Your Content Go Viral
While there is no 100% sure article marketing strategy to make your content go viral, there are a few things you can do to increase your content’s chances. Over time, the following article marketing strategy will give you an increased chance to make sure your content goes viral Tie your niche to the latest relevant news. Sometimes the news will jump straight out at you–those in the credit, debt relief, and make money online niches have had it “easy” for the past year. But the news you use doesn’t have to be an obvious tie to your niche. If you look hard enough, you can usually make one of the day’s headlines work for you. Perhaps you can show how disaster would have been averted if someone had just followed. In other words, if the day’s news isn’t relevant to your niche, make it relevant if you have to. Turn your article into a video. You don’t have to be professional actor or even very good speaker in order to do this. Just be able to speak loudly and clearly enough so that people can understand what you’re saying. Put a watermark on the bottom with a link to your site, then upload to Youtube. Then you’re ready to: Get your article and your video up on Twitter–and get others to do the same. Tweet the links to your article and your video. Shorten you link with a service like Tinyurl.com or bit.ly, so that you’ll have space in your tweet to tell people what the link is about. Get everyone you know to retweet your link. Don’t know many people who know you well enough to retweet for you? Perhaps you can offer an incentive. If you don’t have any reports, software, or discounts that you can give to people who do you favors, find some. (These will also come in handy for list-building, and for product launches where plenty of other people are selling the same thing you’re selling, and you need to set yourself apart from the crowd.)
4 Emerging Trends of the Real-Time Web
There is a lot of hype surrounding the real-time web, and much of the feeding frenzy reminds me of the RSS space four years ago — though there is a lot of potential, there is also a lot of noise. How do you navigate through it all and which developments should you be paying attention to? What are the emerging trends for companies and entrepreneurs to watch for? Here are four real-time web trends that I’m tracking. Please share in the comments any other real-time trends that you think will be big. Real-time will play a major role in the future of online collaboration. We’ve seen all the hype around the newGoogle Wave platform, as well as the growth of Twitter and Twitter-like communications (such as Facebookstatus). On the business side, SAP’s Gravity, a prototype of real-time collaborative business process modeling within Google Wave, is a good example. But I see this as the tip of the iceberg. Companies that are more efficient have an advantage whether within their walls or with their customers. Imagine being able to make real-time changes with your colleague in another city and graphic designer at your local Kinko’s to finalize a presentation and print it hours before your meeting. Or working with your manufacturer in Nanjing, China on changes to your new BBQ grill design and seeing if it’s possible in real-time. Or game developers in Korea and Dallas story boarding a new video game concept in a new real-time game development application. There is massive potential for real-time collaboration across almost every discipline, and I believe there are an incredible amount of exciting possibilities here. The reality right now is that there isn’t enough critical mass of real-time data in most areas, but when those tipping points are met, watch this space. This is not just about Twitter feeds, but shopping information, individual health information, movie and show reviews, and many other treasure troves of data. Waze, which is a crowdsourced mobile map and traffic information service, is effective in Israel where it initially launched and needed just 0.5% of the population to become a reliable service. It recently launched in the United States, and will be challenged to reach critical mass in its target markets for its product to be useful to end users, who provide the real-time data that is uses. While Waze is not necessarily an analytics application — it’s a real-time information app (though it does analyze the data it receives in real-time to expose traffic patterns, accidents, and speed traps to users), it is an example of necessary tipping points for analytics to be relevant. Once you have these real-time data sets, so many fields will be able to become more accurate and relevant in their decision-making processes. What type of real-time data would you like access to? With Microsoft’s and Google’s recent foray into real-time search, it would be easy to assume that real-time search startups are dead in the water. But I believe there are many opportunities for startups in the space, especially as public life streaming activities increase (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, IMs) and real-time search moves to vertical categories. Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re wondering if you should you go see Depeche Mode in concert or if they are too old now to put on a good show. What are people saying about their concert from the evening before? If your search allows you to narrow your focus by date to make sure you’re getting info only from last night’s show, exclude all messages under 10 characters to filter out irrelevant information, and those from their home area of Basildon, Essex UK to rule out biases, you should be able to get a clear picture of what people think. Now that’s information I can really use. For the larger players, it will be a golden opportunity to capitalize on more event-driven ad dollars. Imagine the euphoria during the World Cup or Superbowl and all the tweets and messages surrounding these events. Now imagine the highly targeted ads that could be displayed to these users selling them championship videos or t-shirts at the height of their emotions. I’m still amazed by the uncanny targeting of ads within Gmail, so it should be a short step for Google and other major advertising companies to be able to implement targeted ads across real-time streams. German company Apnoti indexes real-time pricing for consumers in the U.S and Germany. The primary benefit of their service is to help consumers find dramatic price fluctuations and to take advantage of pricing errors on various ecommerce sites. But this is really quite elementary compared to what is possible. For true real-time pricing to occur, there needs to be real-time inventory management, which will depend on major infrastructure companies such as EDS or IBM to build out those systems. As retailers move closer to real-time inventory management, they’ll improve on their pricing and sales efforts since they will be able to create more efficient price equilibrium adjustments. For consumer facing applications, real-time pricing can be a competitive advantage for perishable goods. For example, the grocer with fresher fruit can theoretically charge or sell more by providing real-time freshness data. With the growth of smart energy grids, real-time pricing of solar energy and electric power provides tremendous cost-savings for consumers. Generally within ecommerce, real-time inventory information that is accessible through the web is valuable for both the consumer and company. What are the other areas of high impact? Travel? Off-season luxury goods? Event tickets? Let us know in the comments below. There are so many areas that will be impacted by real-time technologies and practices in the coming years. I’ve highlighted these four trend areas, but where else do you see the real-time web changing our companies and lives? - 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates Image courtesy of iStockphoto, slobo Tags: List, Lists, real-time, trends
Bernard Moon is Managing Director of the Lunsford Group, which is a private holding company consisting of entities in technology, media, research & consulting, health care, and real estate. He blogs at Silicon Moon.
1. Real-Time Collaboration is Ripening
2. Real-Time Analytics Will Be Hot
3. Real-Time Search is Looking Up
4. Real-Time Ecommerce is Coming
More social media resources from Mashable:
- 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business
- 6 Incredible Twitter Powered Art Projects
- 5 Ways Social Media is Changing Our Daily Lives
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